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As the 69th anniversary of the Nagasaki atomic bombing approaches, a
former mill worker in the present-day city of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka
Prefecture, spoke about his untold story on how he burned coal tar to
block the view of U.S. aircraft as they were about to drop the A-bomb on
the city.
The United States initially set the Fukuoka
Prefecture city of Kokura, today's Kitakyushu, as the first target for
the atomic bombing on Aug. 9, 1945. However, U.S. aircraft flying over
Kokura on that day had to change their target to Nagasaki due to low
visibility over the skies of Kokura.
While stories related to the incident have been
rarely told in consideration of A-bomb victims in Nagasaki, three former
employees of Yawata Steel Works -- present-day Nippon Steel &
Sumitomo Metal Corp. -- have recently told the Mainichi Shimbun about
the project to create a smoke screen over the sky to protect the city
from bombing.
Of the three workers, Oita resident Satoru
Miyashiro, 85, who worked at a can factory in the steel mill at around
the end of the war said he burned coal tar to lay a smoke screen on Aug.
9, 1945.
Miyashiro was at the office next to the factory
on that day when he heard a radio broadcast, saying a few U.S. aircraft
were flying northward. As an air-raid siren went off, his supervisor
told him to start the incinerator, in which oil drums filled with coal
tar were lined up. After confirming black smoke shooting up into the
air, Miyashiro evacuated to an underground vault. When he returned to
the office after the B-29 bombers had flown away, Miyashiro learned that
the city of Nagasaki had been attacked by a "new kind of bomb."
Miyashiro said about two days before the Nagasaki
attack Yawata steel workers learned that Hiroshima had been wiped out
by the "new bomb" from their colleagues who had come back to Yawata via
Hiroshima. He thought the next target would be his city as there were
arms factories located in the area.

According to U.S. military documents that have been collected by
former professor Yozo Kudo of the
National Institute of Technology,
Tokuyama College, two U.S. aircraft, one carrying the A-bomb, reached
the skies of Kokura at 9:55 a.m. on Aug. 9. They attempted to drop the
bomb three times, but pilots could not see the target which was blocked
by "fog and smoke." They then decided to switch to a second target,
Nagasaki, and dropped the bomb there at 10:58 a.m.
Meanwhile, documents kept by the former Defense
Agency say the Imperial Army's western military command headquarters
issued preliminary warnings for an air raid on 7:48 a.m. on that day,
and two minutes later, it issued an air-raid siren. Miyashiro is
believed to have turned the incinerator on at this time.
Two other workers at Yawata mill also saw the
incinerator. They told the Mainichi that they saw a pile of oil drums,
cut up in half, that had been filled with coal tar. Coal tar is a
by-product in steel making, and it produces black smoke when burned.
A meteorological record from an observatory in
Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, says that the local weather for Aug.
9, 1945 was fine. The observatory recorded mild fog over the Kokura
area, just across the Kanmon Channel.
Records of Kitakyushu city history say that the
fog and smoke that prevented the atomic bombing on Kokura had been
caused by not only clouds, but also smoke from the Yahata air raid on
the morning of Aug. 8, and winds carried smoke toward Kokura. However,
there is no evidence to support this theory. There is a record of
residents saying the smoke from the Aug. 8 air raid had disappeared by
the next day as an evening shower had struck the area.
Nagasaki University professor emeritus Hideo
Fujisawa, 80, believes that the black smoke from the burning coal tar,
mixed with air-raid smoke and ash as well as steam caused by the rain
the day before, could have blocked the U.S. aircraft's view. He said,
"It should be noted that Yawata mill workers had been alerted by their
own information that Hiroshima had been bombed."

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